Contemporary Black Feminist Authorship: Chimamanda N. Adiche and Bernadine Evaristo
Sarah Back
Are we seeing the emergence of a new form of authorship in the 21st century? The aim of this project is to explore this question by taking a comprehensive look at the contemporary activist feminist author. Their authorial staging will be related to existing concepts of the subjectification of the authorial figure. It will be demonstrated how challenging societal norms connected to the 'political-intellectual writer' (e.g. Western, white, male) leads to the emergence of a distinct feminist-activist form of authorship. The construction of the authorial persona comprises three practices: intermediality, bodying and positioning. By presenting contemporary authors Chimamanda N. Adichie and Bernadine Evaristo as case studies, it will be demonstrated how through the interplay of these practices, a new form of feminist authorship emerges.
Firstly, intermediality, which takes place primarily on digital platforms, can be defined as a vehicle for the construction of authorial selves and for strengthening their activist agency: Activist discourses are processed in intermedially constructed narratives, and through strategically connecting fiction and non-fiction in them (by attributing 'reality' and 'authenticity'), the political relevance of their literature is underlined. Using the means of bodying – through Black feminist aesthetics, Black feminist gazing, theatricality, etc. – the author places their body in the foreground. By presenting it as a sight of intellectuality and agency – both in contrast to the socially practised disembodiment of the primarily female author and against dominant images of the Black female body as obscene, ridiculous, inferior, etc. – they work against the body-related expectations of the figure of the female author and define their distinct authorship through their body. Through the third practice, that of positioning as a form of constant, fluid, self-staging, the author maintains control over their – medially assigned and frequently conflicting – roles and thus manages to reconcile previously mutually exclusive personae (e.g. artist, activist, celebrity). The practice of positioning enables the author to assume an autonomous standpoint and to eventually render the non-white, non-male experience a “universal” one.